Malek Haddad
Haddad, Malek (1927-78). Algerian poet and novelist. Haddad developed the idea that the ethnolinguistic extraction of Algerian francophone writers is bound to lead them to merely instrumental uses of the French language, while they retain a nostalgia for their mother tongue, Arabic or Berber, which the coercive French educational system vainly attempted to eradicate after the military occupation of Algeria in 1830.
He was involved in political and cultural issues as a result of his personal experience of French schools in his native Constantine and in the university of Aix-en-Provence, which he left on the eve of the Algerian War. His first publications were newspaper articles in Alger républicain, the dominant organ of the Parti Communiste Algérien, between 1948 and 1950. La Dernière Impression (1958), Je t'offrirai une gazelle (1959), and Écoute et je t'appelle (1961) are his most acclaimed novels, but his reputation rests mainly on his poetry, collected in Le Malheur en danger (1956), and an essay, ‘Les Zéros tournent en rond’ (1961), which embody the paradoxes of his mastery of the French language: ‘Nous écrivons le français, nous n'écrivons pas en français.’ The relation between the Algerian writer and the French language is felt by him as a historical absurdity.
From 1961 to the independence of Algeria Haddad travelled as an FLN spokesman to the Soviet Union, Egypt, and India, where he advocated the case for the war against the French. After 1962 he organized the cultural supplement of the newspaper An-Nasr and contributed several articles in French until 1968. In spite of his active participation in the Premier Colloque Culturel National in June 1968, in the First Panafrican Festival in July 1969, and more generally in the creation of a new literary tradition, when he objected to the continued use of French and when he acted as a general secretary for the Union des Écrivains Algériens in 1974, Haddad was never able to come to terms with a guilty feeling of bi-cultural ambiguity: ‘En vérité, je crois n'avoir jamais été à ma place. Je me suis trompé d'époque … l'histoire a voulu que j'aie toujours été à cheval sur deux époques, sur deux civilisations’.
[Abdelhamid Zoubir]
